The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for collecting data related to a status of an electrical power system.
As it is known, protective relays are widely used in electrical power systems. Such relays are used to monitor the functioning of the power systems and upon the occurrence of predetermined operating conditions to intervene and protect the systems from possible incoming faults and damages. This is typically accomplished by tripping an associated circuit breaker.
With the introduction of microprocessor-based electronic relays, the possibility to store data related to the status of the power system under various operating conditions, in particular at the time before, during, and after the tripping of the associated circuit breaker, and including also the inputs and outputs of the relay itself under such conditions, has become a customary requirement and a necessity for proper analyses.
To this end, many different solutions have been implemented using the various types of electronic memories presently available. The existing solutions are designed case by case by having the relay treats some specific performances and functionalities as privileged, whereas some others are partially or even completely relinquished. For example, in some cases the data stored under operating conditions are completely lost when the power feeding the relay is for some reasons switched off, in some other applications the rate between the cost of the storing units and the quantity of data that they can store is not optimized, or the access time to the storing unit is not fast enough, or the number of times that data can be stored/erased is to some extent limited, et cetera.
It would be therefore desirable to provide a solution which allows to optimize the actual relay architecture and achieve a better compromise among various possible performances and functionalities with respect to the existing solutions when collecting data related to the various states of an electric power system.